FSUCML Lecture Series - Dr. Jayur Madhusudan Mehta
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Join us from 7-8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 12 for Dr. Jayur Madhusudan Mehta's lecture on "Fighting Processes of Historical Erasure in Louisiana: Climate Change, Industrial Development, and Heritage." Admission is FREE and refreshments are provided.
Jayur Madhusudan Mehta is an anthropological archaeologist and his research focuses on human-environment interactions and monumentality in the New World, especially in and around the Lower Mississippi Valley and Mississippi River Delta. He is skilled in geoarchaeology, ethnohistory and the archaeology of complex societies. He currently teaches at Florida State University as an assistant professor in the Anthropology department. Previously, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts in the Humanities department and Tulane University in both the Anthropology and Environmental Studies departments. He has taught field and classroom-based courses, in topics ranging from culture history to archaeological methods to environmental studies.
The Mississippi River Delta is an expansive and dynamic coastal delta that has attracted human settlement for thousands of years. Over this time frame, hundreds of monumental complexes were constructed amidst the marshes, bayous and river levees. These complexes fundamentally reworked the ecology of the deltaic plain, creating topography and enhancing biodiversity, whilst also creating novel viewsheds from which to see and be seen. These monumental places were engineered to last and they were emplaced to reflect the anthropogenic and natural worlds. In the French colonial era, the river delta became the seat of a new empire, an entrepot from which massive wealth was generated, and which rested on the backs of enslaved Africans and rapidly disappearing Indigenous communities. My most recent excavations are a community-directed effort to highlight the daily, material and religious lives of enslaved Africans and free people of color. Herein, I review the archaeological history of the Mississippi River Delta, showcase my excavations and articulate a path forward for reciprocal archaeology that reaches as far forward into the future as it does into the past.
Location -
Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory
3618 Coastal Hwy 98
St. Teresa, FL 32358